Anti-American-Baiting
Posted on April 28th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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While it does betray a certain intellectual bankruptcy, the mainstream conservative fixation on Wright is so strong because Wright offended against Americanism, which is far more serious to this sort than anything to do with race one way or another. Incidentally, this is also why I think the charges of “race-baiting” in ads being played in local and House elections are overblown–the message is not to associate local Democrats with a black man as such, but rather to associate them with the “anti-American” sentiments of Obama’s former pastor. (But remember, when Democrats complain that their opponents impugn their patriotism, they are supposedly hallucinating.) Most of the same people who now obsess about Obama’s associations used to give Obama enormous praise because he said the sorts of nice, saccharine, inoffensive things about American goodness that they find most agreeable, but Wright (and Obama’s refusal to repudiate him entirely) changed all of that by saying critical things about America, added together with his loopy conspiracy theories, and they have chosen to identify Obama with these sentiments, rather than the ones he actually expresses on a regular basis.
Of course, the correct conclusion to take away from Obama’s campaign is that he is entirely too boosterish when it comes to talking about America’s role in the world. Naturally, mainstream conservatives feel obliged to portray him as a new McGovern, even though coming home is the furthest thing from Obama’s intention with respect to American deployments around the world. They likewise want to insist that he is a bad Americanist, when he basically shares the same triumphalist vision and progressive nationalist interpretation of American history that they have. They wish to portray him as someone who is “pessimistic” about America (because he acknowledges that there are problems and failures), when he is the most irrepressibly optimistic candidate of the last fifty years, and I don’t say that as a compliment. They have to keep emphasising how far away from them, the mainstream conservatives, he is supposed to be, because otherwise people would begin to notice all of the assumptions that they share with him, which would either make him more viable or reveal them to be further to the left than they would want to acknowledge.
P.S. It will be an interesting test of the down-ticket effects of an Obama nomination if Childers, who held the plurality of the vote before the run-off, ends up losing in the wake of this ad. You also have to marvel at the phoniness of the suburbanite Greg Davis posing with the farmer by his tractor, when Childers is the overwhelming favourite of the rural and small town voters. Of course, because Childers’ base is exactly the kind of people likely to be insulted by Obama’s San Francisco remarks the ad may be unusually effective. We shall see.
Filed under: politics
I’m not offended by Rev. Wright’s imputation of sinfulness to this country, nor do I think it unpatriotic to point to national failings, so often congruent with one’s own. I would be more inclined however, to say “God have mercy on America!” or “Great Physician, heal America,” rather than “God Damn America!”
I’m given pause, rather, by the loopy conspiracy theories and the apparent failure of a preacher of black theology to speak to the sins that prevail among his own ethny. Would Obama appoint a Special Prosecutor to seek out the formulators of HIV?
Brilliant analysis – Obama is a pleasant, sunny interventionist imperialist: a smarter, left-wing version of Reagan or Bush (and that is no complement to Obama, Bush or Reagan). This probably explains much of the vitriol against Obama on the right even though the reality is that all three remaining candidates are terrible (Obama being a little better because he is younger but – give him time…).
It reminds me of that Jefferson quote about fearing for our country because God is just.
Here’s the most important line: They have to keep emphasising how far away from them, the mainstream conservatives, he is supposed to be, because otherwise people would begin to notice all of the assumptions that they share with him.
Here is the true victory of liberalism, the true defeat of conservative thought, not in the policy specifics but in assumptions of how things are and how the world works. It takes the liberal worldview that one knows better than others what’s good for them to spawn a Project for a New American Century, or that Iraq and the whole Middle East would be better remade in our image and likeness (or one sufficiently “western” and “democratic” for our tastes) or that anyone on earth would greet an invasion force as liberators because they mean well….
Conservatives know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, liberals think good intentions absolve every error.
It takes the liberal worldview that one knows better than others what’s good for them
I don’t think liberals are the only ones guilty of intellectual arrogance. But liberals are wrong in thinking that their positions are justifiable through an appeal to universal reason alone, and that those who disagree are somehow irrational or prejudiced or both, or they are not putting enough effort into doing what should be done or what reason dictates, and that is all success requires. Hence their explanations for why things are not going as they should be in Iraq and so on.
[...] Leaving aside discussing what intellectual tasks are too difficult for Hannity (our time here on earth is limited, after all), the portrayal of Obama as a fraud is not a sign of nervousness. There is something else going on here. As I’ve said before a couple times, there is a dynamic of disappointment and competition behind mainstream conservative attacks on Obama: his optimism and Americanism must be shown to be fraudulent, because they compete the competing mainstream conservative version of these things, and the assumption that they are fraudulent inspires feelings of disappointment and anger towards a liberal whom they had once hoped would be respectable and respectful of their views. They and Obama are closer to one another than probably either side would like to admit, which is why you see so much pious sermonising attacking Obama from the left about the “racism” of his church while trying to find excuses to pin anti-Americanism on him with such dubious controversies as the flag pin. In a related way, “pro-Israel” conservatives cannot, must not, admit the possibility that Obama is also just as ”pro-Israel” as they are, because that would mean that there are alternative ways to be “pro-Israel” other than theirs. This is not exactly nervousness, but the arrogant sense of superiority that any P.C. inquisitor has for his target, who does represent a challenge but whom they are quite confident they can destroy politically. [...]